Some notes on postverbal subjects in declarative (and other non-wh-) sentences

Abstract

This paper discusses the syntactic and interpretative properties of sentences with immediately postverbal subjects (i.e. VSX constituent order) in European Portuguese. Two types of VSX word order are described and analyzed within the generative framework. One type in which, according to the proposed analysis, the verb and the postverbal subject stay inside the IP space and one type in which the verb or both the verb and the subject move to positions in the CP space, i.e. the sentential left periphery (Rizzi 1997, 2004, and subsequent cartographic approaches). The ‘IP type’ VSX sentences have a thetic, wide focus interpretation with no single constituent assigned any type of informational highlighting (Kuroda 1972, 2005). It is suggested that theticity is a kind of sensory (especially visual) evidentiality. This motivates the presence of an Evidential head in the functional structure of the IP, which is targeted by verb movement, deriving the postverbal position of the subject. Sentences with the ‘CP type’ VSX order do not constitute a homogeneous group, but share an evaluative import, generally conveying criticism. Under the proposed analysis, those bearing focus on the subject are derived by movement of the subject DP to Spec,FocusP (Rizzi 1997, 2004), which gives it the contrastive interpretation, and movement of the verb to a higher Evaluative head in the sentential left periphery (Ambar 1999, Corr 2016). Inverted conditionals (Iatridou and Embick 1994) and coordinate non-degree exclamatives (REFERENCE) share verb movement to Evaluative with subject-focus VSX sentences, but do not display contrastive or other highlighting of the subject, which signals that FocusP plays no role in their derivations.